2. Getting WordPress hosting for your website

You can optimize your WordPress website extraordinarily well, but if the hosting is crap, then all the optimization in the world won’t count, and you’ll end up wrongfully complaining and asking why is WordPress so slow?

Here are the 4 best WordPress web hosts that you should consider when starting a WordPress website:

WordPress hosting for startups, or low budgets, or low/medium traffic, or all of the above

They have their own caching system to speed up your WordPress site, which does a very good job on its own if you have an optimized website overall (theme, content, plugins), and don’t have a ton of traffic;

They have data centers on 3 continents: North America (Chicago), Europe (London and Amsterdam), and Asia (Singapore);

Simple and free Cloudflare CDN implementation from your control panel (cPanel). This only works if your site is using www. So, if you really want your domain to use www, then you should go for that, otherwise, use Cloudflare directly from the source.

I’ve used HostGator when I started ThemeSkills, but then I moved to SiteGround.

I wouldn’t have recommended it until several months ago, but they did make some important improvements, and it can be a pretty decent alternative to SiteGround if – for whatever reason – you don’t want to host your WordPress website there.

The things they’ve improved are:

Support – you don’t have to wait one hour or more on live chat;

Free SSL (HTTPS) – They finally started offering free SSL! And I like that the SSL certificate is automatically added to every domain, so you don’t have to activate it yourself. It’s also good that they enforce this since no website should be on HTTP anymore these days.

Don’t fall for that 100k+ average site traffic a month, though. That’s just marketing.

Here’s what they say:

HostGator does not impose any limits on the number of visitors your website can receive. However, there are practical limits associated with the CPU and RAM available to your server.

The ‘However’part makes all the difference.

Every user that comes on your site triggers different executions and database queries, which consume resources.

In shared environments, resources are not plentiful, and usually, they set daily limits which differ from hosting to hosting.

So, I really doubt that your WordPress site can sustain up to 500,000+ visits per months, even if it’s very well optimized.

If your WordPress website is very, very well optimized, perhaps you could get to a maximum of 100,000 visits on the Business plan, depending on its resources.

3. Choosing a theme for your WordPress website

Picking one that’s packed with features that you don’t need, or one that’s poorly developed, or both, will affect your website’s performance and speed.

You should usually try and choose a WordPress theme that’s more targeted, designed for a certain niche, therefore doesn’t have a ton of features, as multipurpose themes have.

Yes, I know I’m using Avada, which is a multipurpose WordPress theme packed with features, but you do what the Pope tells you to do, not what the Pope does :D .

Also, I wanted a very flexible theme because I tend to change the design every now and then, and I need different options to choose from. It’s easier than changing the whole theme; at least for me.

Moreover, Avada is pretty well optimized. It allows you to combine JavaScript and CSS files, load media-queries files asynchronously, and it also allows you to disable the features that you don’t use (e.g. sliders), so they won’t unnecessarily load if you don’t use them, which is very important.

This is a marketplace, so different WordPress themes are created by different developers who submit them to ThemeForest.

There are a lot of good themes and a lot of bad themes. There are also a lot of outdated and abandoned themes.

So, as a general rule, always look on the right sidebar at Last update, and also check the Comments section to see if the developers are available, active, and helpful.

You can also look at the Software Version section, but some of them simply forget to change that part.

If a theme hasn’t been updated in, like, 6 months, then you should probably avoid it.

But it depends. Even if a theme isn’t recently updated, it doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be compatible with the latest WordPress version, especially if the theme is light, not packed with a ton of features.

So, if you really want a theme that hasn’t been recently updated, ask the developer if it’s compatible with the latest WordPress version, and also check the comments section to see if anyone is complaining about compatibility issues.

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Hi, I'm Radu!

I'm the founder and one-man army behind all of this. Even though ThemeSkills was founded in 2014, I've been working with WordPress and SEO since 2011. I also know a bit of Photoshop and a bit more CSS and HTML. I also own WebStoked.com and Radu.link.